Cancelled in Red, page 14
“Go on,” said Bradley.
“Last night I had an appointment with Mr. Storm at his office—that was at six. Somehow we missed connections. I waited for him, going some place for a cocktail and then returning. Still Mr. Storm hadn’t arrived. I … well, I was pretty angry about what Adrian had done to me. I hadn’t realized the truth until that afternoon, when Mr. Storm explained just how Adrian had managed to swindle me. I decided to face Adrian with it, so I called his office for an appointment. He told mc some one was coming to see him at seven, but that he’d be free at seven-thirty.”
“That seven-o’clock appointment must have been Gregory,” said Larry, without turning away from the window.
“Thanks,” said Bradley, dryly. “Well, Miss Warren?”
“I had dinner at a little restaurant somewhere near Adrian’s on Nassau Street. At seven-thirty I went up to his office. When I got there I … I found him dead.” She paused, her lower lip caught between her teeth. Bradley showed no sympathy.
“Go on,” he repeated.
“I … I went into the private office where he was. On the corner of the desk I saw a gun, and foolishly I picked it up and looked at it.”
Bradley leaned forward. “What sort of a gun?”
“I … I don’t know. I mean, it was a pistol, or a revolver, or whatever you call them. I don’t know what kind it was.”
“Do you own a gun yourself, Miss Warren?”
“No … I’ve never owned a gun,” Lucia said.
“It isn’t a good idea to deny it if you do,” Bradley warned her. “My men are going over your apartment right now. If you have a gun—”
“I haven’t!” she insisted. “I’ve never had one in my life.”
Bradley shrugged. “Go ahead. You picked up the gun …”
“Then I … I put the gun down. I realized the police should be notified. I went around to the telephone and started to dial. Then, I … well, frankly, I was terrified, Inspector. I ran. I began to see that I wasn’t in a very good position. I had quarreled with Adrian. I … well, people might think …”
“So what did you do?” Bradley’s voice was stern.
“I telephoned Mr. Storm. I told him Adrian had been murdered and that I was in trouble. I asked him to come downtown and he said he would.”
“Big-hearted Larry,” said Bradley.
“He came,” Lucia continued. “I told him just what I’ve told you. He … we … we saw no reason why I should be mixed up in the murder, I hadn’t killed him. I didn’t know who had. So Larry agreed to … to go up and wipe my fingerprints off the gun and the telephone. But he got there too late, Inspector. Since he didn’t actually do anything wrong, you can’t arrest him, can you?”
Bradley ignored her question. “You didn’t see any one else in the office or in the building?”
“No.”
“There wasn’t any one lying unconscious on the floor of the waiting room when you went in?”
“Good heavens, no, Inspector!”
“Did you notice a bottle on the receptionist’s desk, a strange-looking liqueur bottle with a piece of a tree in it?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You mean it wasn’t there?” Bradley’s voice was sharp.
“I … I don’t know, Inspector. I didn’t see it. Of course it may have been there. I walked straight to the door of Adrian’s private office. I wouldn’t have noticed it when I left. I was running.”
“When you ran you didn’t take that gun with you?”
“I left it just where I found it,” Lucia said.
“How do you account for the fact that there wasn’t any gun there when I arrived?”
“I don’t know, Inspector. Larry thinks that—”
“I don’t care what Larry thinks,” Bradley said. “I want to know what you think!”
Lucia spread her hands in a little gesture of bewilderment. “It can only mean that there was some one there after I left, and before you came.”
“That would seem to clear you,” said Bradley.
Lucia smiled at him. “I’m afraid it does, Inspector.”
“Like hell it does! We have only your word for it that there ever was a gun there!”
“But why should I lie about that, Inspector?” Lucia prot-ested.
“Because it would clear you!” Bradley said. “Did you know Ezra Luckman?”
“I never heard of him till Larry mentioned him just now.”
“What were you doing this afternoon, all afternoon?”
“I haven’t been out of my apartment today till your man came for me,” she told him.
“I hope you can prove that, Miss Warren?”
She shrugged. “The elevator operator and the doorman at my apartment building should be able to vouch for me.”
“Sure,” said Bradley. His anger and irritation were apparently mounting. “Sure, they’ll know just what to say, without a doubt. Haven’t you forgotten to mention this time that you left a catalogue of your father’s collection on Adrian’s desk?”
“I had forgotten for the moment,” said Lucia. She seemed to be in better control of herself than she had been at the beginning of the interview. “But I did leave it, Inspector. I … I put it down on the desk when I started to telephone. When I ran out I … I simply forgot it.”
“You’re sure you hadn’t seen Adrian, talked to him about it, quarreled with him, and—”
Larry turned around from the window. “You’re bluffing again, Bradley. Miss Warren has admitted that she was there after the murder. She’s told you what she did. She’s explained how her fingerprints happened to be there. She has an alibi for this afternoon. What more do you want?”
“I don’t like it,” Bradley said. “It’s so pat, so perfect—fits like a glove! Damn it, why did you plan to conceal all this? Why did you persuade Mr. Storm to endanger himself by attempting to obliterate evidence?”
“I guess I hadn’t thought it out very clearly,” Lucia said. “At the time I was pretty badly frightened, Inspector.”
The inspector stood up. “I’m going to ask you to wait here, Miss Warren, until the men who are searching your apartment report to me and I have your alibi checked.”
“I’ll wait,” Lucia said.
“You don’t have to wait, Lucia,” said Larry. “He hasn’t a shred of evidence on which he can hold you. I think he’s exceeded his rights in getting a search warrant for your place.”
“You should have been a lawyer, Storm,” Bradley said, angrily. “By God, I’ve half a mind to—”
The uniformed officer stuck his head in the door again. “Nicholas is here, Inspector.”
“Hold him till I’m ready to talk to him,” said Bradley.
“Okay, Inspector. And,” the man added, “they’ve found the gun!”
Bradley gave Lucia a triumphant glance. “So they found it, eh?”
“They’re almost certain, Inspector. The ballistics man hasn’t tested it, but the calibre checks and two shots have been recently fired from it. It’s on the way down here now.”
“Well, Miss Warren, how do you explain that?” Bradley asked.
Lucia was twisting her gloves into a tight knot. Larry went quickly over to her.
“I … I can’t explain it!” Lucia whispered.
“Hey, Inspector,” said the uniformed man, “it wasn’t the boys at Miss Warren’s that found it. The gun was in Ezra Luckman’s top bureau drawer! It beats all how it got there, after him being shot to death about a mile away in the Park.”
Chapter 19
Bradley stood staring at the policeman for a minute. Then he seemed to make up his mind.
“Hold Nicholas as I told you,” he ordered. He turned to
Lucia. “I’m going to let you go for the time being, Miss Warren. We’ve got to get some of these facts straightened out before we can act intelligently.”
“Hear, hear!” Larry said, softly.
Bradley gave him a baleful look. “You’re none of you in the clear,” he warned. “You’ve all acted outside the law in this case. You’re to stay where I can get hold of you at a moment’s notice. Now, get out!”
Grinning, Larry took Lucia’s arm and led her from the office. Outside, his smile disappeared and he sighed heavily.
“Thank God, you seem to be out of that for the moment,” he said. “Now how in the hell did that gun get back to Luckman’s after he was shot with it? And how did Bones get there?”
“Bones?”
Larry gave Lucia’s arm a little squeeze. “So much has happened that you haven’t heard, Lucia. I’ll have to take a day off to tell you about it.”
“Why not come back to my place with me now?” she suggested. “If Bradley’s men have left anything of it, I have some scotch, and we could send out to Longchamps for some dinner.”
“No can do,” he said, wearily. “God knows I’d like to. But I’ve got to call on a client of mine—Mr. Julius. He has a lot of information I need about Bones.”
“Couldn’t I go with you?” Lucia asked. “Will it take so long? Afterwards we could go on to my place as I suggested.”
Larry looked at her and smiled. “The siren song is irresistible. Besides that, you may enjoy Mr. Julius. I’ll tell you about things on the way.”
Mr. Julius lived on Eighth Street near Wanamaker’s in another brownstone house. As Larry and Lucia rode uptown in a taxi he told her about Bones’s disappearance and his subsequent recovery by Mr. Julius. He told her about Luckman, and Stevens, and Gregory, and Slick Willams, and the other people who had become involved in the case.
“So you see why things are so twisted up,” he concluded. “It looks as though the murderer had fallen into a nest of observers when he went to Adrian’s. Perhaps the crook next door heard him and made tracks for the open spaces. Gregory encountered him, to his misfortune. Poor little Bones must have stumbled over him. And Luckman must have known something—known plenty, if it was necessary to get rid of him.”
They got out of the taxi at Mr. Julius’s house and went into the foyer. Mr. Julius’s card was stuck in the brass bell-plate. Larry rang the bell and then lowered his ear to the speaking tube.
Presently Mr. Julius’s voice came through with such volume that it nearly split Larry’s eardrum.
“Well, who is it?” shouted the old man.
Larry put his mouth to the tube and shouted back as loudly as he could. “Storm! Got to see you.”
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
The front door catch began to click furiously. It continued clicking long after Larry and Lucia had climbed to the second floor and rounded the turn toward the third. Mr. Julius lived four flights up. By the time they reached the top they were breathless. Mr. Julius stood in the open door.
“Too many cigarettes,” Larry panted. “This is Miss Warren, Mr. Julius.”
“Heard of you,” said Mr. Julius, crisply. “Modern generation has no stamina. Those stairs keep me young. Well, great Scott, Storm, show the lady in.”
Larry and Lucia preceded Mr. Julius into the apartment. Once inside the door they both stopped, staring around them with awed expressions. Mr. Julius’s sitting room was something to behold. A gas log, which had removed most of the oxygen from the air, burned with a sickly blue flame in a false fireplace. Directly in front of the log was a large, old-fashioned black leather sofa. There were no bookcases in the room, but hundreds of books had been stacked around the walls in teetering piles. Some of the piles had fallen over. Newspapers from weeks back were scattered on the chairs, tables, and floor. Directly over the fireplace hung a reproduction of Rosa Bonheur’s “Horse Fair.” But the most prominent object in the room was a huge glass aquarium standing on a table behind the couch. It was filled with growing green stuff, moss, stones, and a labyrinth of catacombs, in and out of which swam a horde of goldfish. There were so many fish that collision seemed inevitable.
“Like it?” Mr. Julius’s voice broke in sharply on their
inspection.
Larry swallowed hard. “It’s … it’s very homey,” he said.
“It’s charming!” Lucia managed.
“No frills,” said Mr. Julius. “I always say no frills, no
affectations where a man lives. Have the things you like. Always enjoyed sitting on that sofa at the Union Club. Finally persuaded ’em to sell it.” He chuckled. “Then I gave up my membership. Joke on ’em. Sit down—you’ll like it!”
They sat down, side by side. The couch was undeniably comfortable.
“I can offer you some port,” said Mr. Julius. “Never keep hard liquor. Bad for the kidneys.”
“We’re only stopping for a minute,” Larry started to protest.
“Naturally,” snapped Mr. Julius. “It’s my bedtime.” He disappeared.
Larry and Lucia exchanged glances.
“God, this is immense,” said Larry.
“But, Larry, he’s lovely. You mean he actually found Bones?”
“He actually did,” said Larry. “I’m here to find out just how.”
Mr. Julius returned with the bottle of port and three glasses. He poured the drinks cautiously, evidently having some invisible measuring mark on the glasses. One taste of the wine and Larry knew that this was an experience. It was superlative. He said so.
“Believe in having nothing but the best,” said Mr. Julius. “But they rob you nowadays.” He cleared his throat. “Well, I suppose you want details?”
“I’m going to give you some first,” Larry said. “Luckman’s dead—murdered. Killed with the same gun that was used to murder Adrian.”
“Humph!” said Mr. Julius.
“They found him in the Park near the reservoir. Later they found the gun in Luckman’s own bureau drawer.”
“They what?” shouted Mr. Julius. Lucia jumped.
“They found the gun in his apartment, in the top bureau drawer.”
“And he was out in the Park?”
“That’s right,” said Larry.
“It makes everything very complicated,” said Lucia.
“That, my dear young woman, is a decided understatement,” said Mr. Julius. He stood for a moment, frowning at the gas log. Absently he picked up a thin, wafery biscuit from the table and crumpled it into the aquarium. There was frantic excitement in the fish world. “My story is simple enough,” he said. “Visited a dozen people—Stevens, Gregory, that clerk of Adrian’s among ’em. Finally got to Luckman’s house. Don’t mind saying, the more I thought of it the better I liked Luckman as a suspect. He’s the type, Storm. Shrewd, cool, and he’d bear a grudge behind that smile of his. Well, when I got there he wasn’t in. Finally roused the landlady.” Mr. Julius chuckled. “Put on an act. Said I had an appointment with Luckman. Said it was an outrage for an old man to be kept waiting. Combination of bullying and bribing finally got me into Luckman’s rooms to wait for him. The boy was there. That’s all there is.”
“What time was that?” Larry asked.
“About five,” said Mr. Julius. “I’d decided that would be my last visit of the day. Beginning to get hungry. Well, I saw the boy was drugged … got a doctor. Then phoned you. Naturally, I talked to the woman again. Scared the liver out of her! Oh, she talked. Said she hadn’t seen Luckman all day, but she’d heard him moving around in his rooms about four.”
“When?” Larry asked, quickly.
“About four. Why?”
Larry put down his glass and reached for a cigarette. “That’s interesting, because they found Luckman in the Park about four—and he’d been dead for some time.”
“Hmmm,” said Mr. Julius, scowling. He was staring at the sickly blue flame. “Murderer has plenty of nerve, by heaven! Must have brought the boy and the gun to Luckman’s apartment. Must have known his ground, known he wasn’t likely to encounter any one in the house. Landlady lives in the basement.”
“But why?”
“Got a soft streak,” said Mr. Julius, matter-of-factly. “That’s proved by the fact he didn’t kill Bones. Wanted him found somewhere, selected Luckman because he’d killed Luckman. No one to explain. Gun thrown in to make it confusing.” Mr. Julius wagged his head sagely. “Better to find the gun than to have the police searching everywhere for it. Police have everything now. Two bodies, the gun that killed ’em. Bones is back. Nothing to search for. No one pawing over belongings. Oh, the police have the facts but no wits to use on ’em.”
“They’re pawing over my belongings right now,” said Lucia.
“Fools!” said Mr. Julius. He crumpled another wafer into the aquarium.
Larry’s tone was exasperated. “I suppose you can put all the facts together and supply the answer?”
Mr. Julius’s eyes twinkled. “Not quite. But I can use my brain, instead of holding my head and moaning! Said it before, Storm, and I say it again. This is a stamp murder. What’s been done about stamps? Nothing. All they’ve done is badger Miss Warren here and your friend Nicholas.”
“Well, the facts have been a little misleading to Bradley,” said Larry. “Lucia’s prints were in the office! Lon was running around with a gun screaming for Adrian’s blood.”
“Man Bradley’s a fool,” snorted Mr. Julius. “What was taken from Adrian’s office?”
“Nothing,” Larry said.
“How d’you know?”
“Louderbach says so.”
“Rubbish!” said Mr. Julius. “Moral certainty Adrian robbed Miss Warren here. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth, you said. Where are they? Substantial haul, isn’t it? Would
Louderbach know about ’em. Of course not. Adrian wouldn’t let his clerk know he had a fortune in stolen stamps. Why don’t you go over Adrian’s stuff, Storm—hunt for ’em? If they’re gone, well, the murderer must have taken ’em. They’ll come on the market sooner or later. Then you’ve got him!”
“It’s an idea,” said Larry.
Lucia leaned forward. “But, Mr. Julius, isn’t it very unlikely that Adrian would have kept the stamps he stole from me at the office, where Louderbach might come across them?”
“Had to keep ’em somewhere,” said Mr. Julius. “Office, home, safety-deposit box! Bradley can get you access to all of ’em.”
